1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system management method and management apparatus, and more specifically to a technique for managing an operation of an Information Technology system that includes any or all of a server, a storage device, and a network.
2. Background Art
As virtualization technology has been developed, servers are consolidated in a data center in some cases, recently. As it also facilitates introduction and disposition of servers, Information Technology (IT) systems (hereinafter also referred to as “business systems” or “information processing systems”) can be easily introduced. This trend is based on an intention to make the best use of the server resources. On the other hand, as the servers are consolidated, traffic between the servers is also consolidated, which may create bottlenecks in network resources before in the server resources. When a bottleneck is created in the network, the server cannot receive a request from clients or other servers, which may degrade the service quality provided by the server. This tendency is not only specific to the Internet Protocol (hereinafter referred to as IP) network but also to the Storage Area Network (hereinafter referred to as SAN). To solve the problem, the server deployment that takes account of network performance is required. This resembles the theme of routing a traffic path between two points on a network.
For example, JP Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2005-136982A describes a method for routing a path to meet requirements by calculating unused capacity on the network in Multi-Protocol Label Switching environment in routing a path within a network. JP Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2005-266933A describes a method for determining storage based on data traffic on the SAN.
The conventional arts disclosed in the above-mentioned JP Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2005-136982A and JP Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2005-266933A assume a fixed value for unused capacity on a network.
As incoming IP packets and access to storage change depending on the number of upper-layer applications and accessing clients, both the server traffic and the storage traffic do not necessarily flow by a certain amount. If a path is routed based on an average value in these circumstances, it causes a traffic bottleneck during the traffic peak hour, leading packet loss in the communication between servers (or between a server and storage). The packet loss affects the service quality on the network because it takes time in communication to resend the data. If a path is routed based on a fixed peak value, some of the network resources (or the SAN resources) left unused, which means that the network is not effectively used.
The present invention is adapted in view of the circumstances, and the object of the present invention is to provide a technique for preventing a bottleneck from occurring on a network while effectively making use of the bandwidth of the network.